Yackety Yack - You're Not Saying Jack!

I loved this essay -

Enough About Me. Now, About My Kids...

By JOE QUEENAN      SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 Wall Street Journal

I recently decided to stop going to social gatherings where I have to listen to people run their mouths. It isn't because I've stopped liking my neighbors and friends, and it isn't because I'm tired of people who feel a need to remind me how much they despise Sarah Palin, as if that were the planet's best-kept secret.

No, I can no longer stand listening to people tell me how great their kids are.

Deep inside, everybody wants to talk about what a sensitive, caring, wonderful human being he is. But this is impossible when you work for a law firm that cold-calls Colombian drug dealers to see if they need any extra legal representation, when you've publicly boasted about cheating on your taxes, when everyone knows you've had an affair with an underage roadie for a Flock of Seagulls tribute band, when you've moved into a gated community to avoid even having to breathe the same air as minorities. 

So instead, you tell people how jaw-droppingly great your children are. Britney is spending the summer working for Habitat for Humanity. So is Courtney. Dylan is in Burkina Faso, teaching local wretches how to make designer T-shirts out of organic mangoes. Aisha is interning at a company that designs noiseless, subterranean windmills. Yes, Kayla is getting a law degree, but only so she can help political prisoners from Darfur get green cards. And Caitlin and Skyler are spending junior year abroad participating in demonstrations against the governments in Athens, Damascus and Tehran, as course work for their degrees in Global Goodness Studies.

Wherever something truly wonderful is being done, these kids are at the epicenter of the action. They make the Little Sisters of the Poor look like thugs. 

The upwardly moral children of the bourgeoisie are obsequiously, uncompromisingly virtuous. They ride bikes everywhere. They never eat meat. They refuse to watch television. They eat with wooden chopsticks. They only read books by authors named Jonathan who live in Brooklyn. They themselves are named Jonathan and live in Brooklyn. That is because everyone who is good and just and whip-smart and special in this society lives in Brooklyn. If you had good children like mine, you would know that. Your children probably live somewhere horrid, like Toledo, Ohio. And they're probably named Susie or Fred.

 

As a mean-spirited, amoral crank who has labored mightily to raise reasonably insensitive kids, I find precociously virtuous children revolting. Luckily, I don't have any. I don't want my kids bailing out the faceless Trans-Caucasus masses or helping Jimmy Carter hammer nails in Detroit. I want them to be rich, so they can buy me a chalet in the Alps or at least cover my geriatric wisdom-teeth extractions. I grew up poor; I'm looking for payback.

But my dislike of the resplendently righteous springs from a deeper source. I was always taught that charity vaunteth not itself, that the purest form of philanthropy was the kind that avoided chest-thumping, Ben & Jerry's-style self-congratulation. If your kids were the most wonderful people ever to grace the planet, you (and they) should keep a lid on it. 

More than that, as an alumnus of the proletariat, I kind of miss the child loser. I long for the days when co-workers announced that one of their kids just got hired to be a tough for a dirty union or was pulling a double-nickel at Sing Sing.

I pine for the days when people lifted glasses of Asti Spumante to toast kicking their lazy kids out of the house. I look back fondly on the days when parents talked about skipping town without leaving a forwarding address, so that their freeloading progeny couldn't find them. I long for the days when people's kids weren't so ferociously, ostentatiously, implacably good. 

This is probably because I grew up in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, people don't raise nice kids. Their parents would disown them.